HOW TO READ1 (1929) Ezra Pound Part I: Introduction Largely Autobiographical, Touching the Present, and More or Less

Immediately Past, “State of Affairs.” Literary instruction in our “institutions of learning”2 was, at the beginning of this century, cumbrous and inefficient. I dare say it still is. Certain more or less mildly exceptional professors were affected by the “beauties” of various authors (usually deceased), but the system, as a whole, lacked sense and co-ordination. I dare say it still does. When studying physics we are not asked to investigate the biographies of all the disciples of Newton who showed interest in science, but who failed to make any discovery. Neither are their unrewarded gropings, hopes, passions, laundry bills, or erotic experiences thrust on the hurried student or considered germane to the subject. The general contempt of “scholarship,” especially any part of it connected with subjects included in university “Arts” courses; the shrinking of people in general from any book supposed to be “good”; and, in another mode, the flamboyant advertisements telling “how to seem to know it when you don’t,” might long since have indicated to the sensitive that there is something defective in the contemporary methods of purveying letters. As the general reader has but a vague idea of what these methods are at the “centre,” i.e. for the specialist who is expected to serve the general reader, I shall lapse or plunge into autobiography. In my university I found various men interested (or uninterested) in their subjects, but, I think, no man with a view of literature as a whole, or with any idea whatsoever of the relation of the part he himself taught to any other part. Those professors who regarded their “subject” as a drill manual rose most rapidly to positions of executive responsibility (one case is now a provost). Those professors who had some natural aptitude for comprehending their authors and for communicating a general sense of comfort in the presence of literary masterwork remained obscurely in their less exalted positions. A professor of Romanics admitted that the Chanson de Roland was inferior to the Odyssey, but then the Middle Ages were expected to present themselves with apologies, and this was, if I remember rightly, an isolated exception. English novelists were not compared with the French. “Sources” were discussed; forty versions of a Chaucerian anecdote were “compared,” but not on points of respective literary merit. The whole field was full of redundance. I mean that what one had learned in one class, in the study of one literature, one was told again in some other. One was asked to remember what some critic (deceased) had said, scarcely to consider whether his views were still valid, or ever had been very intelligent. In defence of this dead and uncorrelated system, it may be urged that authors like Spengler, who attempt a synthesis, often do so before they have attained sufficient knowledge of detail: that they stuff expandable and compressible objects into rubber-bag categories, and that they limit their reference and interest by supposing that the pedagogic follies which they have themselves encountered, constitute an error universally distributed, and encountered by every one else. In extenuation of their miscalculations we may admit that any error or clumsiness of method that has sunk into, or been hammered into one man, over a period of years, probably continues as an error— not merely passively, but as an error still being propagated, consciously or unconsciously, by a number of educators, from laziness, from habits, or from natural cussedness. “Comparative literature” sometimes figures in university curricula, but very few people know what they mean by the term, or approach it with a considered conscious method. To tranquillize the low-brow reader, let me say at once that I do not wish to muddle him by making him read more books, but to allow him to read fewer with greater result. (I am willing to discuss this privately with the book trade.) I have been accused of wanting to make people read all the classics; which is not so. I have been accused of wishing to provide a “portable substitute for the British Museum,” which I would do, like a shot, were it possible. It isn’t. American “taste” is less official than English taste, but more derivative. When I arrived in England (A.D. 1908), I found a greater darkness in the British “serious press” than had obtained on the banks of the Schuylkill. Already in my young and ignorant years they considered me “learned.” It was impossible, at first, to see why and whence

1. New York Herald Tribune, “Books,” 1929. 2. Foot-note a few decades later: The proper definition would be “Institutions for the obstruction of learning.”

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and there. Two issues of the Supplement yielding. I ascribed the delay to mere time. etc. a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression. catastrophic changes. They found the plan “too ambitious. as they say. among them an anthology printed in 1830. of hang-over. ninety years. I perceived that there were thousands of pounds sterling invested in electro-plate. A. perhaps. It was incredible that literate men—men literate enough. or in some quality of a cadence. or two or more thousand followers repeat and dilute and modify. and thereafter two dozen. In two days came a hasty summons: would I see him in person. would depreciate the value of those electros (of Hemans. clearly marked. more complicated than biology. 1931. pulley and inclined plane.” came the awstruck tones. in another. easily. 1915. I still thought: With the attrition of decades. let alone swift. lever and fulcrum. I sought the banks of the Seine. 1910. that is. yes.the current opinion of British weeklies. needing nothing for it but quotations from the Times Literary Supplement. I approached a respected agent. and looking out on the waste heath. And we could.” For a Method Nevertheless. is founded on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury?” From that day onward no book of mine received a British imprimatur until the appearance of Eliot’s castrated edition of my poems. but against a so vast vested interest the lone odds were too heavy. the method I had proposed was simple. or of Collins. they will admit that . to his professed belief. Embedded in that naive innocence that does. and yet another dated 1795. he was even openly amazed at the list of three hundred items which I offered as an indication of outline. let us say. and express it. displayed such familiarity with so vast a range. but about Palgrave? I did. wedge. ah. It is not. I had said: “It is time we had something to replace that doddard Palgrave. No autochthonous Briton had ever. I had read Stendhal’s remark that it takes eighty years for anything to reach the general public.” “But don’t you know. “that the whole fortune of X & Co. In opposition to it. I mean that I thought they wanted to. to their credit. “repaired” to an equally augUst and long-established publishing house (which had already served his and my interest). more particularly of poetry. the sort of fool-column that the French call a sottisier. In poetry there are simple procedures. and even the present. On the mantelpiece of the humble country cottage I found books of an earlier era. and there are known discoveries. in another seventy. They had ventured to challenge Palgrave: they had been “interested”—would I send back my prospectus? I did. and the least change in the public taste. (Later. I believed him. would be a twelve-volume anthology in which each poem was chosen not merely because it was a nice poem or a poem Aunt Hepsy liked. all of them still as useful as when they were first invented. But that is not all of the story. but were hindered. one page of the Egoist. and of Churchill. Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery. With this in mind. We are not asked to memorize a list of the parts of a side-wheeler engine. or two hundred. who wrote the satiric verses. let us say. mathematics. Two years later a still more august academic press reopened the question. it is perhaps the only one that can give a man an orderly arrangement of his perception in the matter of letters. presumably. As I have said in various places in my unorganized and fragmentary volumes: in each age one or two men of genius find something. there are the forces of superstition. Cowper. there by the sox of Jehosaphat was the British taste of this century. apply to the study of literature a little of the common sense that we currently apply to physics or to biology. and of later less blatant cases. . for two years.) For years I awaited enlightenment. as if one had killed a cat in the sacristy.” but that if they did it would be “more in the nature of gems. In the study of physics we begin with simple mechanisms. Its subject-matter. Yes. to write the orderly paragraphs that they did write constantly in their papers—believed the stupidities that appeared there with such regularity.
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. and even against organic stupidity. the human consciousness. but he was too indolent to recast my introductory letter into a form suited to commerce. pervade our universities. Did I know what I had said in my letter? I did. however. Against ignorance one might struggle. He was courteous. under the December drizzle. and no one ever supposed that it was. One winter I had lodgings in Sussex. He. is more complicated than are number and space. . and that the best history of literature. We apply a loose-leaf system to book-keeping so as to have the live items separated from the dead ones. we ran fortnightly in the Egoist. It may be in only a line or in two lines. touched with a slighter flavour of mustiness). We proceed by a study of discoveries.D. People regard literature as something vastly more flabby and floating and complicated and indefinite than. I found him awed.” They said they might do “something. but because it contained an invention.

They regard it as dangerous. II The practice of literary composition in private has been permitted since “age immemorial. Literature was permitted as a subject of study. or at any rate they indicate the first gropings of association.” like knitting. You do not put discoveries by Methodists and Germans into one category. usually some verbose gentleman writes a trilogy of essays. They try every idiotic and degrading wheeze to tame it down.
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. chaotic. Germany had a “great university tradition. or for any contact with life in general. dualist. and supposed to have a refining influence on the student. subversive. a marasmus. it was known to be permitted in Germany. It was necessary to curtail this pernicious activity. And they do this from sheer simian and pig-like stupidity. Let us by all means glance at “philology” and the “germanic system. show how the associative faculty can be side-tracked. To avoid confusion. not merely of some novelty on the surface—he would aid his student far more than by presenting his authors at random. I mean definitely as nutrition of impulse. I have cited as an exception the forty versions of the Chaucerian anecdote. Just as good literature does often worry them. Defective Relativities It is said that in America nothing is ever consciously related to anything else. and from their failure to understand the function of letters. so long as he keeps it to himself. And its study was so designed as to draw the mind of the student away from literature into inanity. and. III It appears to me quite tenable that the function of literature as a generated prize-worthy force is precisely that it does incite humanity to continue living. or more probably of morphology. in special cases. or other sectarian. “we” may say that this system was tesigned to inhibit thought. or with scientists’ attempts to sub-divide the elements in literature according to some non-literary categoric division.. I 88osgos. rotarian. Let us grant that some bits of literature have been. was also known to be permitted at oxford. they and the great edition of Horace with the careful list and parallel display of Greek sources for such line or such paragraph. and off public life in particular. displayed in relation to some other bits. and feeds it. the thinkists were given a china egg labelled scholarship. crocheting. After 1848 it was. on three grandiose figures. it does not transgress the definition of liberty which we find in the declaration of the Droits le l’Homme: Liberty is the right to do anything which harms not others.” Speaking as an historian. monist. this presentation would be entirely independent of consideration as to whether the given passages tended to make the student a better republican. You do not divide physics or chemistry according to racial or religious categories.” which it behoved America to equal and perhaps to surpass. in Germany.And if the instructor would select his specimens from works that contain these discoveries and solely on the basis of discovery—which may lie in the dimension of depth. All of which is rather negattve and unsatisfactory. It occupies the practitioner. monarchist. This idea may worry lovers of order. etc. and were gradually unfitted for active life. etc. Why Books? I This simple first question was never asked. that it eases the mind of strain. let us say. and discoveries by Episcopalians or Americans or Italians into another. ne nuit pas aux autres. was permitted the German professor in. verbroots. They try to make a bog. Needless to say. observed that some people thought. In America it was permitted from precedent. or some weaker variety of it. to keep his mind off life in general. comparing their “philosophy” or personal habits. This study. a great putridity in place of a sane and active ebullience. one should state at once that such method has nothing to do with those allegedly scientific methods which approach literature as if it were something not literature. The study of literature. and talking about them in toto.

the very essence of their work. In introducing a person to literature one would do well to have him examine works where language is efficiently used. and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati.. its circulation would have depended on educators. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. in the aggregation of humans. and educators have been defined as “men with no intellectual interests. And this function is not the coercing or emotionally persuading. The great writers need no debunking. That was after a few years of “pause and reflection. in the res publica. but a short guide to the subject. Part II: Or What May Be an Introduction to Method It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandages.” For the thing would have been a text-book. and subsequent to the events already set forth in this narrative. It did not define a gun in terms that would just as well define an explosion.” The subject was pleasantly received and considered with amity. and it was more careful in its definitions and verbiage. When we set about examining it we find that this charging bas been done by several clearly definable sorts of people. the individual cannot think and communicate his thought. in the republic.e. as it is exact in formulation of desire. The pap is not in them. the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot. I mean that the medieval mind had little but words to deal with. without words. I mean it maintains the precision and clarity of thought. They do not lend themselves to imperial and sentimental exploitations. or bullying or suppressing people into the acceptance of any one set or any six sets of opinions as opposed to any other one set or halfdozen sets of opinions. dedicated to Mr. In depicting the motions of the “human heart” the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. and a lesson not yet half learned. A civilization was founded on Homer. With this general view in mind. This is a lesson of history. which ought to mean the public convenience (despite the slime of bureaucracy. the application of word to thing goes rotten. after a lapse of four years.” One “moves” the reader only by clarity.” Hence. though not with any great hope that it will rouse them. despite the mass of dead matter that these people have heaped up and conserved round about them in the proportion: one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes. but the house finally decided that it would pay neither them to print nor me to write the book. or in mathematics. one might say: It does not matter whether the author desire the good of the race or acts merely from personal vanity. i. It is not only a question of rhetoric. true to human consciouness and to the nature of man. and to an American publishing house). Misquoting Confucius. despite the smokescreens erected by half-knowing and half-thinking critics. because we “weren’t in the text-book ring. It is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps fresh for the new reader. i. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools. this essay. it in part lost in losing the feel and desire for exact descriptive terms. and by a periphery of less determinate sorts. Glenn Frank. the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws. not the twelvevolume anthology. and doesn’t need to be squeezed out.e. What the renaissance gained in direct examination of natural phenomena. I proposed (from the left bank of the Seine. Or “dans ce genre on n’etmeut que par la clarte.” but maintains the health of thought outside literary circles and in non-literary existence. or excessive or bloated. the health of the very matter of thought itsel£ Save in the rare and limited instances of invention in the plastic arts. When their work goes rotten—by that I do not mean when they express indecorous thoughts—but when their very medium. of loose expression. In proportion as his work is exact. The Macedonian domination rose and grew after the sophists. becomes slushy and inexact. but also of the loose use of individual words. civilization not a mere bloated empire. To get at them. and the execrable taste of the populace in selecting its rulers)? It has. It has to do with the clarity and vigour of “any and every” thought and opinion. not merely for the benefit of a few dilettantes and “lovers of literature. The thing is mechanical in action. It also subsided. in general individual and communal life. nor explosions in terms that would define triggers. so is it durable and so is it “useful”. and other starters of ideal universities.IV Has literature a function in the state. to devise a system for getting directly and expeditiously at such works.
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Sometimes these people are known. or redefine it or start blaming it on some spaniard. usually a terminology originally invented to describe what had been done before 300 B. with reasonable certitude.” They do not exist: their ambience confers existence upon them. he can evaluate almost any unfamiliar book at first sight. dhe number of possible diseases in literature is perhaps not very great. anything definite about the precursors of Homer. (d) (And this class produces the great bulk of all writing. of these the delightful anthologies. for you prefer Wyatt to Donne. It will be seen that the first two classes are the more sharply defined: that the difficulty of classification for pardcular lesser authors increases as one descends the list. the Gongoras3 whose wave of fashion flows over writing for a few centuries or a few decades. some flabbier variant. or discoverable. even if the manifestation be superficially different. are full. (b) The masters. that if a man knows dhe facts about the first two categories. who are not exactly “great masters. we know. leur arnoiance leur confert une existence. for example. The fact dhat six different critics will each have a different view concerning what author belongs in which of dhe categories here given. Benjamin Constant. and succeed in pervading the whole with some special quality or some special character of their own. At their faintest “Ils n’existent pas.
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.” who can hardly be said to have originated a form. or express a doubt as to the origin of Gongorism. these who follow either the inventors or the “great writers. and then subsides.
3. and bring the whole to a state of homogeneous fullness. we will find that the language is charged or energized in various manners. Prevost. If a man has not time to learn different languages he can atleast. The same discoveries have served a number of races. (e) Belles Lettres. (c) The diluters. there are three “kinds of poetry”: MELOPŒIA. Bad critics have prolonged the use of demoded terminology. or they digest a vast mass of subject-matter. One should perhaps apologize. lf he wish to be a good critic he will have to look for himself. That is to say. When a man knows the facts about the first two categories. the starters of crazes. I mean he can form a just estimate of its worth. among the less exigeant. and to describe it in a rather exterior fashion. If we chuck out the classifications which apply to the outer shape of the work.C. When they are most prolific dhey produce dubious cases like Virgil and Petrarch. in response to some purely personal sympathy. I mean to say they either start with a core of their own and accumulate adjuncts. Drummond of Hawthornden to Browne. and there are very few real ones. Longus. wherein the words are charged. As to crazes. The term is properly applied to inventors who. (f) And there is a supplementary or sixth class of writers.) The men who do more or less good work in the more or less good style of a period. Language Obviously this knowledge cannot be acquired without knowledge of various tongues. over and above their plain meaning. apart from their own inventions. the same afflictions crop up in widely separated countries without any previous communication. which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination. these people add but some slight personal flavour. and are not likely to know. and we know that certain finenesses of perception appeared first in such a troubadour or in G. be told what the discoveries were. The good physician will recognize a known malady. Cavalcanti. for colossi. some minor variant of a mode. discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode and process. PHANOPŒIA. apply a number of known modes of expression. Writers of second order have often tried to produce works to fit some category or term not yet occupied in their own local literature. that Arnaut Daniel introduced certain methods of rhyming. are able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions. leaving dhings as they were. the reading of work in dhe odher categories will not gready change his opinion about dhose in dhe first two. which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning. which is again fairly clear. does not in the least invalidate the categories. and see how and where it belongs in this schema. the song books. Donne to Herrick.(a) The inventors. the ossianic McPhersons. poetry. and choice among them is the matter of taste. some diffuseness or tumidity in the wake of the valid. We do not know.” and who produce something of lower intensity. or to its occasion. and if we look at what actually happens. and with very little delay. let us say. who probably pass. but who have nevertheless brought some mode to a very high development. save for the last class. This is a very small class. The point is. without affecting the main course of the story. in.. with some musical property.

or to wonder whether Rimbaud is. It is poetry on the borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe. P. I don’t yet know half there is to know about melopoeia. imagined fact. manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon’s Heaulmière. Logopœia does not translate. their equal. etc. All writing is built up of these three elements. During the last century or century and a half. but nevertheless expressed in factual manner. by force of architectonics. a force tending often to lull. be translated almost. but that merely indicates that the author has been able to get his effect cumulatively. a few books that I still keep on my desk. You may say that for twenty-seven years I have thought consciously about this particular matter. due perhaps to the nature of their written ideograph. perhaps for the second or third time. When it is good enough. it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it save by very crass bungling. or wholly.4 It is not enough to know that the Greeks attained to the greatest skill in melopeeia. By using several hundred pages of prose. of its known acceptances. Neither Chaucer with his forty books. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation. but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage. if you will. Flaubert. or to distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. of the context we expect to find with the word. explicitness. on the other hand. In Phanopœia we find the greatest drive toward utter precision of word. that one
4. The melopœia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear. its usual concomitants. Prose The language of prose is much less highly charged. and the neglect of perfectly well-known and formulative rules. it employs words not only for their direct meaning. though the attitude of mind it expresses may pass through a paraphrase. plus “architectonics” or “the form of the whole. and for half a line at a time. Cœur Simple. nor Shakespeare with perhaps half a dozen. that is perhaps the only availing distinction between prose and poesy. or one might say. nineteenth-century Frenchmen achieved certain elaborations. Sept. That is to say.
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. is probably more important than Theophile Gautier’s Carmen.” that is to say. Lacuna at this point to be corrected in criticism of Hindermith’s “Schwanenedreher. prose. and a great number that I shall never open again. Prose permits greater factual presentation. this art exists almost exclusively by it.” but having determined the original author’s state of mind. and that with the subject never really out of my mind. This does not invalidate my dissociation of the two terms: poetry. or even that the Provençaux added certain diverse developments and that some quite minor. It is practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another. It is the latest come. save perhaps by divine accident. intact. There are. 1938. and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music. you may or may not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent. than by playing through ten dozen heterogeneous albums. can be considered illiterate.” and to know anything about the relative efficiency of various works one must have some knowledge of the maximum already attained by various authors. by a greater heaping up of factual data. you can not translate it “locally. The list is so short. It is not quite enough to have the general idea that the Chinese (more particularly Rihaku and Omakitsu) attained the known maximum of phanopœia. “the dance of the intellect among words. on the other hand. at rare moments. prose has. A man can learn more music by working on a Bach fugue until he can take it apart and put it together. but a much greater amount of language is needed. in folio.” E. arisen to challenge the poetic pre-eminence. But the books that a man needs to know in order to “get his bearings. indeed. and read or read at a great many books. The total charge in certain nineteenth-century prose works possibly surpasses the total charge found in individual poems of that period. and of ironical play. perhaps for the first time. irrespective of where and when.” in order to have a sound judgement of any bit of writing that may come before him. are very few. and perhaps most tricky and undependable mode. One wants one’s knowledge in more definite terms. Phanopœia can. It is an error to think that vast reading will automatically produce any such knowledge or understanding. by Flaubert. In melopœia we find a contrary current. even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. or his prayer for his mother.LOGOPŒIA.

and a dozen poems by his contemporaries. but beginning with the Italians after Dante.. In Italy. Tasso. If one were studying history and not poetry. Ariosto. I mean that Horace is the perfect example of a man who acquired all that is acquirable. Catullus. and cannot be clearly understood until the reader knows that there are three different objectives. English. possibly the Beowulf. and (3) that made to be spoken. one can throw out at least one-third of ovid.” One Elizabethan specialist has suggested that Shakespeare. one might discover the medieval mind more directly in the opening of Mussato’s Ecerinus than even in Dante. we find: OF THE GREEKS: Homer. French. and von der Vogelweide.’s later and unpublished notes. it does not rely on the charge that can be put into
5. etc. Even in Marlowe and Shakespeare there is this embroidery of language.. A specialist may read Horace if he is interested in learning the precise demarcation between what can be learned about writing. without the slightest compunction. or Wolfram von Essenbach. Spanish. and most of Callimachus. there were local attempts. are willing to leave them ignored and to continue dangling in mid-chaos emitting the most imbecile estimates. “Poetry” was considered to be (as it still is considered by a great number of drivelling imbeciles) synonymous with “lofty and flowery language. The culture of Chaucer is the same as that which went contemporaneously into Ferrara. and some more cursory notice of some medieval narrative. and the sagas of Grettir and Burnt Nial. coming through the Latin writers of the Renaissance. it does not so greatly matter what narrative. Propertius. or who are the “first known examples” of the process in working order. ovid. perhaps thirty poems in Provençal. I doubt if anyone ever acquired discrimination in studying “The Elizabethans. abundance. I do not suggest a “course” in Greek or Latin literature. England) Latin diction. the Poema del Cid. etc. The drama is a mixed art. to teach the public (in Spain. took to the stage. and what cannot. and often vitiating their whole lifetime’s production. medieval basis. rather than presentation. and the Divina Commedia. and for centuries we find little else. That is to say. their “charge. in contrast. the whole is elaboration. and so greatly on their being able to count on their audience’s knowledge of the Iliad Even Æschylus is rhetorical. Chaucer is an enrichment. but it had been heard in the Italian law courts. or which couldn’t have been distilled from literary antecedents. we may suppose that the Romans added a certain sophistication. this talk about the matter. From which mixture. After Villon. disgusted with his efforts. and having begun before his time. and wash after wash of Roman or Hellenic influence. poetry can be considered as fioritura. for there are three kinds of melopœia: (1) that made to be sung to a tune. I mean one need not read any particular part of it for purpose of learning one’s comparative values. depends so often.
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. all give us something we cannot find now in Greek authors. I name a few isolated writers. VILLON: After Villon and for several centuries. and depend immensely on him for their effects. that I am omitting thirty established names for every two I include. (The “great dramatists” decline from Homer.” You have grace. professional writers in particular. One can take Villon as pivot for understanding them. as a poet. Limiting ourselves to the authors who actually invented something.wonders that people. five or six pages of Sappho. E.)5 OF THE ROMANS: As we have lost Philetas. at any rate. I beg the reader to observe that I am being exceedingly iconoclastic.” OF THE MIDDLE AGES: The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer. OF THE ITALIANS: Guido Cavalcanti and Dante. around the year 1300. taken in this order. and Virgil.” and he in some measure preceded the verbal richness of the classic revival.” One must emphasize one’s contrasts in the quattrocento. there were new values established. P. (2) that made to be intoned or sung to a sort of chant. revise all this in so far as they demand much greater recognition of Sophokles. all over Europe. perhaps a dozen and a half poems of Guido’s. no ornament that wouldn’t have done just as well in some other connection. with the tongue called “francoveneto. richness of language. and for comparison with them a few songs by Von Morungen. or for which some other figure of rhetoric couldn’t have served. without having the root. troubadours. Italy. but you have probably nothing that isn’t replaceable by something else. we find this fioritura. as an efflorescence. one might say a more creamy version of the “matter of France. Sappho.” at its highest potential. the reader will get his bearings on the art of poetry made to be sung. and the art of joining words in each of these kinds is different. things said that had not been said in Greece. or at least despairing of success. I am omitting the authors who can teach us no new or no more effective method of “charging words. and then Bion’s Death of Adonis. almost an effervescence. or in Rome or elsewhere. and without any new roots. the Italians always a little in the lead. I am chucking out Pindar. The “language” had not been heard on the London stage. And then.

and are of no interest in themselves.) There have been bombast. a movement that restrained without inventing. Longus had written a delicate nouvelle. but calls on gesture and mimicry and “impersonation” for assistance. At this point someone says: “O. And this fuller consciousness. that there was a very limited sort of logopœia in seventeenth. not thinking of Homer. and Spanish). After 1450 we have the age of fioritura. Benjamin Constant. noticed that “poetry. modern verse. as I have said. platonists. or Villon. And at that moment the serious art of writing “went over to prose. and if we read books written before that date we find the number of interesting books in verse at least equal to the number of prose books still readable. A determined specialist can dig interesting passages. all of which things should be relegated to the subsidiary zone: period interest. when we want to know that they had blood and bones like ourselves. 1750 poetry was the superior art. So that Stendhal had already “something back of him” when he made his remarks about the inferiority of ””La Poésie. Fielding. and the English classicists. admit that various sorts of prose had existed. or sonorously rolled at him from the French stage. then someone tries to tidy things up. But. balanced sentences. the estimable Pleiad emasculating the French tongue. And he remarked that poetry.. Border. Bayle. Curricula Before Stendhal there is probably nothing in prose that does not also exist in verse or that can’t be done by verse just as well as by prose. Sterne. Say. as the term was then understood. or more probably re-introduced an old one. and its padded calves and its periwigs. This is perfectly true. and Lorenzo Valla can be managed quite as well in rhymed couplets. And one morning Monsieur Stendhal. Montaigne. we have prose that is quite necessary to the clear comprehension of things in general: with Rabelais. in fact nearly all sorts had existed. Thucydides was a journalist. Ciceronian impressiveness. For example. There is nothing easier than to be distracted from one’s point. One does no favour to drama by muddling the two sets of problems. the art of “charging” language with meaning. Anything that happens to mind in England has usually happened somewhere else first. but directly in parenthesis. they have always existed. and was so considered to be. and the poetry contains the quintessence. i. unless he has grasped this. but having a very keen sense of actuality.and eighteenth-century satire. or Scottish. I will allow the voracious peruser a half-hour for ballads (English and Spanish.” la poésie.” All right. the art of writing.. Apologists for the drama are continually telling us in one way or another that drama either cannot use at all.e. its “fustian a la Louis XIV. the stuff written by his French contemporaries. Herodotus wrote history that is literature. that after the slump of the Middle Ages.the word.”
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. Beginning with the Renaissance. or from the main drive of one’s subject by a desire for utterly flawless equity and omniscience. or even subtle passages out of Pico. Brantôme. the medieval mystics. Let us say. with its bagwigs and its bobwigs. in more delicate modes. etc. Let us try to keep our minds on the problem we started with.” and for some time the important developments of language as means of expression were the developments of prose. legal speech. or can make but a very limited use of words charged to their highest potential. Jane Austen. Even the method of annihilating imbecility employed by Voltaire. historical interest bric-à-brac for museums. or Catullus. appears in l’Abbé Prévost. The prose of the Renaissance leaves us Rabelais. any verse. and the French classicists. And a man cannot clearly understand or justly judge the value of verse. Part III: Conclusions. we go to the poetry of the period. Let us also cut loose from minor details and minor exceptions: the main fact is that we “have come” or that “humanity came” to a point where verse-writing can or could no longer be clearly understood without the study of prose-writing. scholastics. Someone invents something. none of which will be the least use to a man trying to learn the art of “changing language. that reappears later in Heine. Montaigne. then someone develops.” I mean to say tnat from the beginning of literature up to A.” was greatly inferior to prose for conveying a clear idea of the diverse states of our consciousness (“les mouvements du cœur”). after Marlowe and Shakespeare came what was called a “classic” movement. Exceptions. or perhaps with Boccaccio. When we want to know what people were like before 1750. was a damn nuisance. And that Rochester and Dorset may have introduced a new note. Brantome. or sumptuous passages.D. prose “came to” again in Machiavelli. or some dozens develop a frothy or at any rate creamy enthusiasm or over-abundance. for the sake of argument. oratory. the “fioritura business” set in. Petronius had written a satiric novel. but the ballads. (It is a modern folly to suppose that vulgarity and cheapness have the merit of novelty. The actor must do a good half of the work. we begin to find prose recording states of consciouness that their verse-writing contemporaries scamp.

Nietzsche made a temporary commotion. Fabre and Frazer are both essential to contemporary clear thinking. It was kept alive during the last century by a series of exotic injections. which is the art of getting meaning into words. (b) as known during the nineteenth century and up to the present. the versifiers were not idle. newly discovered. if temporary. Byron.During the nineteenth century the superiority. half-attentive skim-over. is at any rate obvious. but of books that show how the pouring is done or display the implements. as the novel developed. to get anything like this directness of presentation one must go back to Catullus.” all for the good. Thought was churned up by Darwin. the first half of Le Chartreuse. and to such degree that I believe no man can now write really good verse unless he knows Stendhal and Flaubert. Le Rouge et le Noir. such an implement. In Rimbaud the image stands clean. It is for us to think whether these implements are more effective than poetry: (a) as known before 1800. If a man is too lazy to read the brief works of these poets. shall we say. perhaps to the poem which contains dentes habet. by industrial machines. Laforgue. Gautier developed the medium we find in the Emauxet Camées. He is a better poet than Landor. redeem poetry from Stendhal’s condemnation. noble. England Against this serious action England can offer only Robert Browning. verse writing. The Ibsen play is. unless in Villon. There is in Corbière something one finds nowhere before him. and that Heine occasionally employs something like it. At any rate Laforgue found or refound logopœia. but sometimes dull. he will learn more about the art of charging words from Flaubert than he will from the floribund sixteenth-century dramatists. I am not talking about the books that have poured something into the general consciousness. Up till then England had been able to contain her best authors. He has no French or European parallel. England in the ’nineties had got no further than the method of the Albertus. If Corbière invented no process he at any rate restored French verse to the vigour of Villon and to an intensity that no Frenchman had touched during the intervening four centuries. Unless I am right in discovering logopœia in Propertius (which means unless the academic teaching of Latin displays crass insensitivity as it probably does). And Rimbaud brought back to phanopœia its clarity and directness. He has. together with a dash of bitters. who slicked up the Flaubertian mode. but now exploited by cheap-jacks. by science. The Goncourts struggled with praiseworthy sobriety. Laforgue is not like any preceding poet. indubitably. Henry James was the first person to add anything to the art of the nineteenth-century novel not already known to the French. by the activity in the prose-media. and still later observe the edifying spectacle of Browning in Italy and Tennyson in Buckingham Palace. We are so encumbered by having British literature in our foreground that even in this brief survey one must speak of it in disproportion. but The Ring and the Book is serious experimentation. let us say. Corbière. by which one can pour. To put it perhaps more strongly. The art of popular success lies simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary reader can lick offit in his normally rapid. There is an “influence of Ibsen. spurred on. Swinburne read
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. France The decline of England began on the day when Landor packed his trunks and departed to Tuscany. The art continues in Maupassant. such as can (though he may not have known it) be found in a few verses of Dorset and Rochester. Les Trois Contes. Madame Bovary. he cannot hope to understand writing. In France. The nineteenth-century novel is such an implement. prose writing. unencumbered by nonfunctioning words. after that we see Shelley. Gautier. any writing. L’Education. who was perhaps the only complete and serious man of letters ever born in these islands. Departing from Albertus. Bouvard et Pécuchet. Beddoes on the Continent. grave limitations. All four of these poets. The main expression of nineteenth-century consciousness is in prose. Rimbaud. we must almost say that Laforgue invented logopœia observing that there had been a very limited range of logopœia in all satire. Or. Keats. or perhaps we must say was. He is not ubiquitously like Propertius. but these things are extraneous to our subject.

if he had defects. from which Shakespeare learned so much of his trade. poetry iS being written by Americans. Henry James led. or advantage in. better than the original.” From which orthography one judges that Richard himself probably spoke like a French-Canadian. the reader who has been appalled by the preceding parts and said. We speak a language that was English. We have no satisfactory translation of any Greek author. the Greeks often were rather Swinburnian. an historian. French. Landor suggests the problem in his dialogue of ovid and the Prince of the Gaetae. Golding’s Metamorphoses. the novelists. FitzGerald made the only good poem of the time that has gone to the people. non-Greek contribution to the art of expression. Catullus wasn’t. as Douglas had heard the sea. etc. there iS no longer any reason to call it English verse. We may count the Seaferer. and his Vita Nuova and early Italian poets guide one to originals. and not wholly muddled with accessories. When Mary Queen of Scots went to Edinburgh she bewailed going out among savages. the only translation of Homer that one can read with continued pleasure is in early French by Hugues Salel.Greek and took English metric in hand. and there is no present reason to think of England at all.
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. let us remember that. The Britons never have shed barbarism. “Oh. Le Grand Translateur. The Greeks stimulated Swinburne. After him even the ballads that tell a local tale tell it in art indebted to Europe. and is to a great extent. To be measured against the Sophoklean economy. so far as I know. etc. at least. and the remaining Anglo-Saxon fragments as indigenous art. since the death of Hardy. beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer. First. Rossetti’s translations were perhaps better than Rossetti. at least from the men who learned it from those poems in the first place. condenser of old stories he had found in Latin.6 Swinburne’s Villon is not Villon very exactly. Apart from these early translations. I have discussed the merits of these translators elsewhere. Curiously enough. From which one may learn the nature of the Latin. he. the sequence of local fashion in British verse by studying the translations of Horace that have poured in uninterrupted sequence from the British Press since I6so. Chapman and Pope have left Iliads that are of interest to specialists.
6. the Irish took over the business for a few years. or. It is the natural spreading ripple that moves from the civilized Mediterranean centre out through the half-civilized and into the barbarous peoples. or was but seldom. After Chaucer we have Gavin Douglas’s Eneados.. Velasquez. if not from the definite poems I have listed. translator of the Romaunt of the Rose. the Beowulf.” may in some measure be comforted. Goya. not for a man who wants simply to establish his axes of reference by knowing the best of each kind of written thing. at least. apart from Yeats. Whether alliterative metre owes anything to Latin hexameter is a question open to debate. There was a faint waft of early French influence. or rather a drivelling and idiotic and superficial travesty of the Italian culture as it had been before the debâcle of 1527. Ambrogio de Predis. every new exuberance. and she herself went from a sixteenth-century court that held but a barbarous. minimizing the debt we owe to Englishmen who died before 1620. Giotto. but I can’t learn all these languages. we have no present means of tracing the debt. The men who tried to civilize these shaggy and uncouth marginalians by bringing them news of civilization have left a certain number of translations that are better reading today than are the works of the ignorant islanders who were too proud to translate. paraphraser of Virgil and Ovid. and there is no need of. it is fed by translation. Histories of English literature always slide over translation—I suppose it is inferiority complex—yet some of the best books in English are translations. but it is perhaps the best Swinburne we have. we had better say. Rossetti brought in the Italian primitives. it is called. That is work for a specialist. was intent on telling the story. every new heave is stimulated by translation. It is one thing to be able to spot the best painting and quite another and far less vital thing to know just where some secondary or tertiary painter learned certain defects. It is a magnificent language. Piero della Francesca. a trans.or mistrans-lation. as he would establish his axes of reference for painting by knowing a few pictures by Cimabue. This is important for two reasons. After this period English literature lives on translation. and by an art not newly borrowed. a man may enlarge his view of international poetry by looking at Swinburne’s Greek adaptations. apart from Homer. In fact. He can study the whole local development. or rather preceded. they are proud to tell you that Tacitus said the last word about Germans. they dealt with a native sub1ect. the language is now in the keeping of the Irish (Yeats and Joyce). every allegedly great age is an age of translations. and then the Britons resigned en bloc. When Richard Cœur de Lion first heard Turkish he said: “He spik lak a fole Britain. Morris translated sagas. Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores. All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans. I am now trying to tell the reader what he can learn of comparative literature through translations that are in themselves better reading than the “original verse” of their periods. and Italian. Neither is there any point in studying the “History of English Literature” as taught. the histories of Spanish and Italian literature always take count of translators. He can learn the art of writing precisely where so many great local lights learned it.

for men who haven’t had time for systematized college courses. The French who know no English are as fragmentary as the Americans who know no French. Then we know where he is. but the critics who use vague terms to conceal their meaning.” “valid. and every other tongue doing likewise. Hugues Salel in French. Modern science has always been multilingual. One simply leaves half of one’s thought untouched in their company. and to Bion. this process leaves us for life with a measuring rod (a) for a certain type of Iyric. No one language is complete. but there are simply certain things he don’t know.” at least been unable to open. if not “howled without.” “indifferent. the Frenchman has to learn English or American. Incidentally. we never wholly forget the feel of the language. Vaccine Do I suggest a remedy? I do.
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. the whole American speech is churning and chugging. rendering it fit to bear some charge hitherto borne only by some other alien tongue. There is no useful English version of Catullus. for obstreperous students who wish to annoy dull instructors. it is as if he were blind to some part of the spectrum. CONFUCIUS—In full (there being no complete and intelligent English version. HOMER—in full (Latin cribs.) A PROVENÇAL SONG BOOK—With cross reference to Minnesingers. of breaking the subject up into crumbs quickly dryable. It is often enough to understand thoroughly the poem. though Chapman can be used as reference). (b) for the German language. but he probably won’t even try to do the latter without study of at least one foreign tongue.” “non-valid. has caused no end of damage to the general distribution of “classic culture. but the process does not stop with any one man. He may be able to invent a new carburettor. Not merely those who use vague terms because they are too ignorant to have a meaning. and every one of fhe few dozen or few hundred words that compose it. The Italian has for some time learned French. mostly by Guido Cavalcanti. beginning. I suppose. To be “possible” in mentally active companv the American has to learn French. OVID—And the Latin “personal” poets. perhaps thirty poems in all. A master may be continually expanding his own tongue. and indeed of all his general terms. I don’t in the least admit or imply that any man in our time can think with only one language. or even work effectively in a biological laboratory. The disuse of Latin cribs in Greek study. so that. however bored we may be by the Grundriss von Groeber. Different languages—I mean the actual vocabularies. In mentioning these translations. He must begin by stating that such and such particular works seem to him “good. about 1820. preparatory to breaking through certain French paste-board partitions. Because of the determined attempt of the patriotic Latinists of Italy in the renaissance to “conquer” Greek by putting every Greek author effectively into Latin it is now possible to get a good deal of Greek through Latin cribs. Catullus and Propertius.” “best. Marlowe’s Amores.” Another point miscomprehended by people who are clumsy at languages is that one does not need to learn a whole language in order to understand some one or some dozen poems. He cannot simply stay in London writing of French pictures that his readers have not seen. While Proust is learning Henry James. one would have either to learn Chinese or make use of the French version by Pauthier). A curriculum for instructors. Call it the minimum basis for a sound and liberal education in letters (with French and English “aids” in parenthesis). and can’t. (Golding’s Metamorphoses. no satisfactory English.which he has now and again improved. The writer or reader who is content with such ignorance simply admits that his particular mind is of less importance than his kidneys or his automobile. that is to say Dante. A good scientist simply would not be bothered to limit himself to one language and be held up for news of discoveries. of what he considers valid writing. DANTE—”And his circle”. This is what we start to do as small children when we memorize some lyric of Goethe or Heine.” I suggest a definite curriculum in place of the present émiettements. and all critics who use terms so vaguely that the reader can think he agrees with them or assents to their statements when he doesn’t. not necessarily painful to himself. The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good. I suggest that we throw out all critics who use vague general terms. and thirty poems by his contemporaries. I suggest several remedies. the idioms—have worked out certain mechanisms of communication and registration. Our contact with oriental poetry begins with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character opens a door that the earlier students had. The man who does not know the Italian of the duocento and trecento has in him a painful lacuna.

It was being used for heroic songin the Hebrides. 1190).” All right. I have touched German in what most of you will consider an insufficient degree. and then suffered a set-back. contain the names of every author who has ever written a good poem or a good octave or sestet. This list does not. Make a man tell you first and specially what writers he thinks are good writers. a “crib. I cannot repeat too often or too forcibly my caution against socalled critics who talk “all around the matter. STENDHAL—(At least a book and half). The intelligent lay reader will instinctively try to do this for himself. in the form that Mori and Ariga prepared certain texts for Fenollosa. A half-dozen hours spent in listening to the lyrics actually performed would give the student more knowledge of that sort of melopœia than a year’s work in philology. the collapse of Italy after 1500.or four-year student. Lack of this dissociation is largely responsible for late renaissance floridity. I rest my case. Men like Yves Tinayre and Robert Maitland are available. There is other available music.7
7. and some general outline of history of thought through the Renaissance. That is to say. In the above list I take full responsibility for my omissions. the fall of Lodovico Moro. Before I die I hope to see at least a few of the best Chinese works printed bilingually. If one finds it convenient to think in chronological cycles. The Kennedy-Frasers have dug up music that fits the Beowulf. and that these procedures are not good in English or French. human lucidity appears to have approached several times a sort of maximum. the fall of the Roman empire. CORBIÈRE. some incursion into his critical writings. plenty of it.” the picture of each letter accompanied by a full explanation. certain professors who have invested all their intellectual capital. to pry out some element that I have included and to substitute for it something more valid. Judgment will gain one more chance of soundness if he can be persuaded to consider Fenollosa’s essay or some other. and incite his students to try. and to me unknown but equally effective.
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. and they haven’t often the courage to cut a loss. with the change from inflected to uninflected speech. One cannot at this point study all the maladies and all their variations. not into his attempts at fiction and drama. i. would I think. he will read them with better balance. RIMBAUD.VILLON— PARENTHETICALLY—Some other medieval matter might be added. FLAUBERT—(Omitting Salambô and the Tentation)—And the Goncourts. etc.. There is no use in following them into the shadows. He would have axes of reference and. It can’t be too clearly understood that certain procedures are good for a language in which every word has a little final tag telling what part of speech it is. Let a man judge them after he has encountered Charles Bovary. elucidation of the Chinese written character.” I suggest the three convenient “breaks” or collapses. The great break in the use of language occurs. I merely insist that without this minimum the critic has almost no chance of sound judgment. and who won’t say frankly that certain authors are demnition bores. For the purposes of general education we could omit all study of monistic totemism and voodoo for at least fifty years and study of Shakespeare for thirty on the ground that acquaintance with these subjects is already very widely diffused. don’t like to admit they’ve been sold. The fall of Alexander’s Macedonian empire. Argument of this essay is elaborated in the author’s ABC of Reading. and that one absorbs quite enough knowledge of them from boring circumjacent conversation. I have omitted “the Rhooshuns. Naturally. I mean he wouldn’t lose his head or ascribe ridiculous values to works of secondary intensity. and some dip into his contemporaries (prose). The study of misguided Latinization needs a treatise to itself. After this inoculation he could be “with safety exposed” to modernity or anything else in literature. and what case it is in. find them dependable.) and in so doing I have not committed an oversight. however. It is not a reason for accepting it as a finality. For practical class work the instructor should try. obviously. I have omitted practically all the fustian included in curricula of French literature in American universities (Bossuet. That may be a reason for giving it some consideration. and the sack of Rome. GAUTIER. and wants to “relate literature to history. Corneille.D. or an object or an accessory. This would not overburden the three. All right. VOLTAIRE—That is to say. For practical contact with all past poetry that was actually sung in its own day I suggest that each dozen universities combine in employing a couple of singers who understand the meaning of words. I have done it. and whether it is a subject. from at least the time of Faidit (A. It is the result of twenty-seven years’ thought on the subject and a résumé of conclusions. Milton got into a mess trying to write English as if it were Latin.e.” and who do not define their terms. Swallowed whole it is useless. spent a lot of time on some perfectly dead period. after that you can listen to his explanation.